I want to selfhost a messaging service for my family. It should be secure and have voice calling option, ideally. Thank you.
From my experience (with Dendrite, not synapse, so keep that in mind), bridges create “fake” users to replicate your contacts on these platform as matrix users, and they are visible on the whole instance by all their users (but you might not be able to talk to them). Also, in puppeted mode (which is what you want to “replace” your app with matrix), only a single user can use the bridge at a time, so the other users cannot use it.
This is true but if you’re self-hosting it’s not that much bother to add additional copies of a bridge for other users (granted, it’s not ideal).
Bridges were not that easy to manage in my case (regarding process management, and ease of config deployment/reproductibility). It was on OpenBSD though, so your mileage may vary. And still, it leaks all of your contact informations to the other users of the server (like their phone number eventually), so definitely not suited for public instances.
I’m on Signal (obviously not self hosted) and even if I really wanted to move to another platform be it self hosted or yet another privacy focussed one, I can’t ask my friends and family to move to another platform again. I already asked them to move away from WhatsApp, can’t do it again…
I host my own matrix instance for my wife, a few friends and I. It has worked great for us. They can either use a web app, or an app on their phone.
I used the official docker image: https://hub.docker.com/r/matrixdotorg/synapse/
My compose file looks like this: https://pastebin.com/3JYzAPr2
Pretty sure I just followed the instructions there.
how have you secured your server when opening your network to the outside?
Matrix.
Just for a family and friends I’d go for xmpp. Matrix is still an enormous greavy piece of software, hard to self host if you don’t want to pay for a gigantic server just for it. Also the UI is more like gamer/company chat (discord, slack…), what may not be what your family expect, coming from whatsapp, telegram, or plain sms. In the contrary xmpp is very light and nowadays a lot of tutorial exists on how to configure it, even with voice/video. Plus mobile apps like conversation match the habbits of other messengers.
This is outdated info. Matrix doesn’t need lots of resources these days. “for instance Synapse uses 5-10x less RAM than it used to (my personal federated server is only using 145MB of RAM atm!” - https://matrix.org/blog/2022/08/15/the-matrix-summer-special-2022/#making-it-fast
Host it for free https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/ & https://paul.totterman.name/posts/matrix-server-guide/
